Errata

Inevitably, there some things that I just got flat-out wrong in The Future Was Here, and some others that perhaps allow for some debate. This page will help us keep track of them. (Hopefully it won’t grow too much more!)

Page 14: Here I write about a “promising new standup arcade division Atari had just launched.” This could be read as indicating that Atari was just getting into the standup arcade market, when they actually invented that market with Pong in the early 1970s. Atari had in 1979 just formally divided itself into a standup arcade division and a home games console division. This left the Atari 400 and 800, while formally a part of the latter, in a sort of limbo.

Page 24: The second pixel in the example playfield is described as “binary 11010, or decimal 11.” A quick check of Table 2.1 will show this to be incorrect; 11010 is decimal 26. The binary number is in fact flipped. It should be 01011.

Page 76: “Before Agnus and Paula begin their painting cycle anew…” It is of course Agnus and Denise that do the painting.

Page 150: The priority of a process in AmigaOS actually ranges between -127 and 128 rather than 127.

Page 160: I state that the first chip in the 68000 line to have a built-in MMU was the 68040. In fact it was the 68030.

Page 170: I state that “ARexx looks likely to remain a unique creation.” While in many ways this statement still stands, some readers have written to tell me that they see a lot of similarities between ARexx and OS X’s AppleScript — more interesting and ironic grist for the argument that the modern Macintosh is the Amiga’s most obvious modern successor.

Page 257: David Haynie’s last name is misspelled as “Hayne” on one occasion here.

Page 296: Footnote 15 states that the one fixed address in the Amiga’s memory is the first group of four bytes. Actually, it is the second four bytes, addresses 4 through 7. This location was presumably chosen to make sure that a program which tries to write to a null, or 0, pointer — a very common programming error — doesn’t overwrite the location of Exec, with disastrous results for the whole system.